The summer after I graduated high school, I packed myself and six friends into my dad’s Ford Explorer and drove up to Marquette, Michigan with a tent, an expired roll of film and a dream. The details of what exactly happened during that week in Hiawatha National Forest will remain a mystery to the outside world, but it formed a sibling-like bond between my friends and I and produced a roll of film that would remain undeveloped until the following fall.
During this adventure into nature, our phones were practically useless. We had no cell service and, even if we happened to pick up some bars, we only had one working portable charger to share between the seven of us. Consequently, we saw our surroundings through the bleary viewfinder of the film camera we had brought, yet we also saw each other more in focus than ever before. Without our phones to escape into, we were forced to be so engulfed in each other’s presence that we began to bicker far more than usual. Even so, we were having the time of our lives. And so — taking the good with the bad — my friends and I developed a tight-knit community during this fateful week, characterized by plenty of arguing but even more laughter. Our camping trip became an annual occurrence, and we kept on shooting film together. By the end of our second trip, we had added at least three rolls to our undeveloped stash.
When my friends and I finally got these photos developed over a year after our initial venture, I realized that they chronicled so much more than a few trips out of town and some nights spent at the beach. Each picture captured moments that felt completely untouched by anyone but us. Time had stopped for us to experience each exposure in its entirety. They illuminated our love and occasional hatred for each other in total clarity. And despite our procrastination, they’d remained patiently in my friend’s bedroom for over a year, waiting for us to return to them when we were ready. They harbor more emotion than I thought possible for inanimate objects; I was breathless. I’d never seen anything so real — in fact, I’d never felt so real myself.
Courtesy of Paige Wilson
Ever since then, I’ve spent more time and money on film photography than seems reasonable. Over the past two years, I’ve filled my walls with countless photos from my adventures, and my desk drawer overflows with old negatives. Yet film isn’t the only vintage medium I’m willing to jump through hoops for. Despite my love for Spotify, I find myself fascinated by vinyl albums. During the pandemic, I developed a habit of doing my schoolwork from the living room while I played my parents’ old records. I liked the way they sounded and the act of turning them over was therapeutic. My parents shake their heads at my commitment to put in the effort for something so dated — they used to have no choice but to wander through the drugstore while their film got developed and debate who would get up to flip the record, but now here I am, doing it all on purpose.
Although CDs became popular in the late 1980s to replace vinyl albums and the digital camera became widely accessible in the 1990s and took the place of film photography, it was the rise of smartphones in the 2000s that truly transformed the landscape of music and photography. Suddenly, listening to music and taking pictures came with a great deal of distraction and a sense of ease. Smartphones have put the ability to post photos and skip through endless albums in the palm of our hands at the press of a button. We hardly get a chance to enjoy this media before we’re pre-occupied with our Instagram story likes or awaiting a demand to “skip that song.”
Despite the smartphones that weigh down our pockets, my friends and I often troll thrift stores searching for old Radiohead albums and working film cameras — and we aren’t the only ones. In recent years, I’ve seen film photography and vinyl albums take the internet by storm. Modern society is so obsessed with efficiency, and yet people are spending valuable time and money on non-digital media, despite the convenience of modern technology. I began to question society’s preoccupation with these outdated forms of media. In the age of smartphones and streaming services, why are so many people reverting back to mediums that require more time, more money and more effort?
In my quest to find an answer, I talked to people who share my passion for the world of media beyond the Apple ecosystem. Andrew Donovan, Taubman and Music, Theatre & Dance freshman, harbors a love for music — especially vinyl.
“Sometime in late middle school, my grandpa gave me a record for my birthday and that was how I first got into it,” Donovan said. “It’s an expensive hobby, so that isn’t always fun, but it gets to the point where you’re just too deep into it, you know?”
He went on to explain why such a pricey hobby was still worthwhile despite the existence of digital streaming platforms.
“I think a pro of collecting records is that you tend to find friends that also do,” he said. “And then it can be something you do together.”
Donovan was onto something. I thought about my own experiences with vinyl. I have a vivid memory of lying with my friends on the floor of someone’s living room, feeling the vinyl version of The Dark Side of The Moon reverberate through my bones. None of us said a word as it played, but I could sense them all next to me, enveloped in the same sound. This experience wouldn’t have been the same without them, nor would it have been the same had a Spotify ad or a text ping interrupted our listening. Only a flip to the B-side of the record would temporarily break our trance. In addition to this sense of community, Donovan also spoke to the intentionality that record-collecting fosters.
“I really like having physical copies of the music because it means the records that I have are albums that I really, really love,” Donovan said. “You have to be a little more thoughtful about the ones that you want to buy and the ones that you’re like ‘eh I don’t really need that,’ and I think there’s a value to that.”
Although I hadn’t noticed it, I’d also become quite choosy. When you’re paying $30 for a record, every track is worth more. You have to consider which albums are truly no-skip, and therefore most deserving of your hard-earned money. But it’s not just money that makes the albums in my collection valuable — most of the albums that sit on my living room shelf have been passed down through a generation or two. When I listen to Jim Croce’s Life and Times on vinyl, I can almost feel my father and grandfather there with me, flipping the same record, hearing it skip during the same lines and singing along to the same choruses.
Photo courtesy of Paige Wilson
Just as vinyl costs more than streaming, film costs more than a digital photo. Luke Van Noord, LSA freshman and president of the University of Michigan photography club, shared his experience with intentionality through shooting film and how it taught him to see the world in a completely different way.
“With film photography, there’s pressure to take less photos, so therefore it trains your eye to be more selective and pick out beautiful things in unnoticed spots,” Van Noord said. “In the car I used to just look down and not look out the window, or going on walks I would be looking at the ground. But I think photography has allowed me to appreciate beauty in everything.”
Van Noord, who first learned how to shoot film from a friend in 2020, has since expanded his knowledge to include a myriad of terms I had to ask him to define. He explained how his deep understanding of the complex mechanisms and adjustments that go into taking and developing a good photo makes the result feel more rewarding.
“I think that it’s very satisfying to take pictures that are good on film versus digital because it requires so much more of a human input,” Van Noord said. “Not saying that that’s not there with digital — it absolutely is — but because I have to fully manual focus my camera and fully adjust the settings it feels more like creating like a painting I guess.”
When Van Noord sees a beautiful thing, rather than snap a simple picture with his phone, he prefers to capture it in a deeply personal way that connects him with the beauty that’s in front of him. Although I had always considered photography an art form, as Van Noord showed me some of his work, I truly began to see his brush strokes — the places where he’d gathered shadows and the places he had blurred on purpose.
He isn’t the only one who sees film photography as a creative art form. Jared Haas, manager at Camera Mall in Ann Arbor, spoke about the act of developing film as far more than just a looming task.
“It’s just like this magical process, but it’s all a transfer of energy,” Haas said. “It’s molecules and light and photons.”
Contrary to taking a picture on your phone or a digital camera, film seems to be an art and a science all wrapped into one. It truly is a product of the person behind the camera, the subject in front of it and how both interact with each other to create a meaningful final shot. During my conversation with Haas, it dawned on me that the light captured in my film photographs that summer after senior year was real, organic light from the sun on the beach on an evening in early July. Light that hadn’t been manipulated by Steve Jobs and the cult of Apple. Light that had shone upon us and warmed our skin while we threw our heads back with laughter. Maybe that same light reflecting back at me two years later is what makes me feel so intensely nostalgic when I look at those pictures of me and my friends in the clear water of Lake Superior during that fateful summer.
Haas gave a voice to this sensation flawlessly, and he assured me that I wasn’t the only person in my generation who had found their way into Camera Mall for some new rolls of Kodak 400 — he has seen plenty of clientele of all ages in the store lately.
“A lot of things that Gen Z experience(s) are not tangible things,” Haas said. “It’s all digital. It’s there, it’s fleeting, it’s gone, it’s in your phone somewhere … when you take photos in a digital era, where do they go? They go into your phone, but it’s like a purgatory for photos. They’re all floating around us but we aren’t experiencing them.”
Haas spoke about his passion for vinyl records and cassette tapes as well, as they also offered him more of a physical experience than that of our smartphone capabilities. When I asked him if he would swap out all of our phones and their functions for these non-digital counterparts, he answered with no hesitation.
“Yeah, I lived in that era,” Haas said. “It was a really different time. You spent a lot more quality time with the people that you loved and that you knew. Sometimes it wasn’t people that you loved and sometimes it wasn’t quality time, but we interacted with people more.”
Haas spoke of the ’90’s and early 2000’s as an era where our interactions looked entirely different. It seems that as technology made our lives easier, it made relationships harder. These days when we’re feeling uncomfortable or shy we can check the weather incessantly or scroll through TikTok rather than breaking the ice. I thought of my friends and our annual camping adventures and why they meant so much to me. We had laughed until our ribs hurt, and we had argued until someone had to storm off into the trees to cool off, but through it all, we were fully present with each other. Our escape from modern technology made us feel every emotion more deeply. Even now, an intense wave of feeling washes over me every time I look at the resulting film.
Photo courtesy of Paige Wilson
“The world needs to be connected, but I think that we need to be connected in a different way than we are,” Haas continued. “I think we need to focus on the ways of connecting that are the most impactful and most meaningful … It’s not always about actually shooting the film or listening to the vinyl, sometimes it’s about having a friend, and being able to socialize over something that’s physical, and real and in front of you — an actual experience that you’re having together.”
I didn’t expect to cry while writing this piece, but I sat with my eyes welling up after my conversation with Haas. I was going back in time in my head — to my summer camp disposable camera, my dad’s old tapes and the vinyl record in our living room that was simply titled “Whale Sounds.” At first, I didn’t understand why so many of us were clinging to a seemingly outdated medium, but through my conversations with other film and vinyl enthusiasts, I’ve realized that it was never really about the medium. It’s always been about experiencing something wholly and completely with the people sitting across from you, and that focused, uninterrupted adventure is something that our current overload of advanced technology simply doesn’t offer.
Flipping over records and loading film could easily have become irksome tasks of the past, but it seems that many of us have decided that the intentional relationships we form around non-digital media are more valuable than our time and money could dream of. Haas is right — we have a long way to go when it comes to connecting in the ways that matter. But it gives me hope for humanity that people still appreciate something because of its capacity to connect us with loved ones, not because it’s quick and easy.
Statement Columnist Paige Wilson can be reached at wipaige@umich.edu.
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